Today, May 17th, we celebrate the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia. Some of you may ask why we keep bringing the subject up.

The Rainbow Flag of the LGBTQ community flying above the Transgender Pride Flag (Source: The Independent).

Things change of course. Many members of the LGBTQ community can now shine without fear or hiding. Xavier Dolan is about to present his latest film at the Cannes Festival. One of the foundational plays of Québec theatre, Les Feluettes by Michel-Marc Bouchard, will be brought to the stage for the first time, this Saturday, at the Opera of Montreal. It will be the first-ever homosexual love story in an opera worldwide. The National Assembly now counts a number of LGBTQ MNAs, beginning with Québec solidaire’s Manon Massé who moved the motion ordering that the rainbow flag be raised atop Parliament on this day, a motion that was unanimously approved by the Members of the National Assembly. Even I tasted this freedom as I ran in two provincial elections without my homosexuality, far from being hidden, ever being a subject of debate.

Unfortunately, much is left to tackle. Every day, children and teenagers are ostracized for being different. Suicide cases remain far too common. And no later than Sunday, during the Oliviers Gala, a comedian decided to make a good joke by outing one of his colleagues from the closet… on stage. I am not even going to discuss the situation of LGBTQ people from cultural minorities or who are members of the First Nations. The situation of elderly people isn’t pink either. And let’s mention trans people who’s legal rights to equality are far from reached. In Canada as in the world, much is left to do.

Things change slowly, at every scale. Last week, we the student Senators of McGill University obtained that the administration review the policies allowing transgender students who’s change of name is not recognized legally to modify their first name in their email addresses, their profile, class lists, student ID card, etc. This modification will now affect employees of McGill University as well. Today, at a larger scale, the Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will introduce a bill to modify the protections against discrimination in Canada so they apply to transgender people. Things change when we work. Whether you are a member of the LGBTQ community, or an ally, help us eradicate homophobia and transphobia.

I’ve already uploaded a fair number of pictures on this blog. You might have found some pretty good. I am indeed proud of a few shots, including some of those that appear in my vertebrate list, such as the photo of two Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans. These are the rare few good ones. Most of my vertebrate list is composed of good to average pictures. Some are actually terrible like the one American Crocodile picture I have. If you want to have an idea of how many shots it takes to get one decent image, visit my flickr site. All pictures follow each other numerically. You will notice that some pictures are separated by ten, fifteen or even thirty missing numbers. Those missing picture were all terrible shots that were swiftly sent to the garbage. If I only kept pictures I’m actually proud of, they would be 200 or 300 pictures apart. Many issues face tropical photographers, some of which I find particularly troublesome. This blog post is a little introduction to my daily hell, or what can go wrong with a camera in the tropics.

Some scenes thankfully yield one good picture like with these two Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans photographed in Gamboa. Note that, at the exception of cropping, I never modify my pictures with any software (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Other scenes are practically impossible to get right. I tried to photograph this American Crocodile, at night, on Barro Colorado Island, as it was swimming in the Panama Canal more than 20 meters away (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

The first major issue is light. After all, photography is all about registering photons on a chemically treated film, or on a digital sensor. To do that, you need to get some photons (duh!). For those of you who come down to warmer countries for vacations on a beach during the dry season, it might seem like a non-issue. Actually, you might get too much light for a point-and-shoot camera. That’s nothing an SLR camera with a good polarizer and a proper choice of aperture and shutter speed can’t fix. Yet, you will not see interesting wildlife on a tourist-crowded beach. To get some fun critters, you need to go to more natural settings. Tropical rainforests are actually quite dark. The canopy stands 40 or 50 meters above your head, and towers over multiple layers of lianas, trees and shrubs which are terribly effective at catching every ray of light. In a healthy tropical forest, it gets quite dark. It can sometimes be difficult to spot snakes on the path. Whenever a shaft of light does go through and reaches the ground, it is so bright compared to the surroundings that it is simply impossible to get a good picture involving such a bright section. You will either have one blinding white star in the middle of a well-exposed picture, or a well-exposed and well-lit section with pitch-black surroundings. I work in a relatively disturbed forest. On a sunny day, each square meter is mottled by many of these overly-lit spots counterbalanced by a very dark background. Good luck getting a good shot.

This is one of the best pictures I ever took under a patchy canopy. The darker parts of the image are well exposed, but where incident light was hitting this Gray-Chested Dove, all colour has turned to white due to over-exposure (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Clouds are actually a good thing for tropical photography. When it is cloudy, only diffuse light reaches the ground, and all surfaces seem to be lit the same way. Thankfully, it gets cloudy quite a lot, there’s a reason why such an ecosystem is called a tropical rainforest. A new issue emerges though. When clouds cover the sky, it gets really dark, twilight- dark when a storm is coming (which happens every single day during the rainy season). In this darkness, the only way to get a proper picture is either to augment the ISO sensitivity to the maximum and get a grainy picture (remember that crocodile?), or to reduce the shutter speed to half a second or even slower. Well guess what, most animals try to get away when they see a human being. In half a second, they can move quite a lot, which gives perfectly ridiculous pictures. Obviously, in such conditions, a tripod is an absolute necessity. A flash can help with these problems, but that only works at short distances and even with a diffuser, it is difficult to get a natural-looking picture. Also, the further you need to zoom, the less light enters your lens. So the darker it gets, the closer you need to be from an animal to get an acceptable portrait.

Let’s just say that any attempt at identification will prove difficult. I tried to photograph this bird in Chagres National Park. With a long exposure time, you really need the subject to stay still (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Speaking of the rainy season, it seems like an obvious statement, but cameras and water do not mix. Showers here are impossible to predict, sudden, and will drench you to the bone. I need to keep all my equipment in little dry-sacks to protect it. That means every time I switch from my telephoto lens (to photograph far-away subjects like birds) to my macro lens (to get close-ups of insects), I need to open my backpack, open a dry-sack, take the lens I was using off my camera, put the new one on, protect the other one and start shooting. Most animals are gone by then. That’s if I’m lucky. If I am not, fog will have condensed on the camera’s sensor during the switch, and that means no more pictures on that day, or until I can get the camera back to an air-conditioned room and wait for that water to evaporate again.

Fog is really the worst part of it. The rainy season is now well on its way. Ambient humidity often reaches 98%. At this level of saturation, water will condense on anything. If you make the mistake of getting out of an air-conditioned vehicle with your camera in hand, it will get completely wet. When I get to the field, I simply have to let my camera acclimate in its dry-sack (which gets wet outside) for a few minutes before pulling it out. The problem with condensation in the tropics is that, since the air is already at saturation, that condensation only goes away very slowly. Wiping your lens will not help, it will only fog up again immediately. I spend an inordinate amount of time waving my camera around gently, while keeping my attention on both an animal to follow its movements and my lens to see when it is fog-free enough to hope for a good picture.

This Euchroma specimen was ready for a photo shoot. But in Chagres National Park, fog decided otherwise (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Basically, unequal lighting, too little light, and fog are my three banes when it comes to photography. I could not forget, and therefore, award an honourable mention to mosquitoes and ants. Yes, mosquitoes are numerous, and can be distracting when framing the perfect shot. Since good photography is also about getting the good angle, I often move around quite a lot to get the right frame. Sadly, with my little side steps, I walked straight into bullhorn acacias a few times. These plants are protected by armies of ants that have a nasty sting.

The last thing you want is to brush against a bullhorn acacia. These little ants are ruthless (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

For those of you that are not yet convinced, I’ve adapted the “Dingométhode, l’école des explorateurs”, laid by the famous French comic artist Gotlib, for tropical photography training. On the evening prior to your training, try to collect as many live mosquitoes as possible (a couple hundred will do). First off, you will need to get into your bathroom. Place a subject for your photograph such as a potted plant or a basket of fruits somewhere in there. Then, let the water flow in your bathtub or shower at its hottest, the goal is to saturate the room with water vapor. Make sure the bathroom light is turned off, your bathroom window is probably brighter than a rainforest is. In the absence of a window, a small camping light should do the trick. If you own an electric kettle, use duct tape to secure the power button so that it keeps going after reaching a boil. Fill the kettle with water, and plug it in the bathroom. Release the hungry mosquitoes and close the door. As the bathroom slowly turns into a wet sauna, move to your closet to get yourself ready. You will need heavy long pants, heavy socks (preferably woolen socks), hiking boots or rubber boots, a long-sleeved shirt and a hat. Cover all of this with your favourite mosquito repellant, set aside to dry. While the repellant dries, fill a hiking bag with useless weight. You need at least the equivalent of two liters of water, field equipment, a lunch, a complete change of clothes and all your photography equipment, so plan for at least 5 kilos (that’s for half a day of field work, for more, add the weight of the extra water). Grab your mosquito-repellant clothes, walk to your kitchen and soak all these clothes and your boots with water (it will have most likely rained on you by the time you want to take a picture). Dress up with the wet garments. Make sure your heavy pants are tucked into your woolen socks and your long-sleeved shirt is tucked into your pants. In real life, you do this to keep away mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, ants, botflies, spiny plants, etc. Put on your heavy hiking bag. Take your camera and bravely walk in your bathroom closing the door behind you. Stand there for five minutes to make sure the mosquitoes notice you and to start getting sweaty (soaking your clothes should have removed most of the repellant, just like in real life). You are now ready, get as far from your subject as you can, aim your camera towards it and try to take a picture. Having trouble? You might now have a little idea of what it feels like. By the way, if any of you have vacations in June or July, you are welcome to spend them with me in Panama.

A special thanks to my dad, Marc Chatel, who managed to dig up a copy of the “Truc-en-vrac 2” album by Gotlib, published by Dargaud, from which this tropical photography training is inspired.

*This blog post was originally published in the “Sous la loupe” section of the Spring 2015 edition of Antennae, the Bulletin of the Entomological Society of Québec.

Who hasn’t felt awestruck at the sight of a monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). That feeling is to be expected. As many other insects, the monarch is desperately trying to be seen: it relies on aposematism, a strategy meant to avoid being eaten. A bird will only make the mistake of eating a monarch once. This butterfly is filled with cardenolides, toxic compounds that are acquired during the larval stage as the caterpillar is feeding on milkweed (Asclepias sp.). After this disturbing experience, the disgusted bird will remember to avoid any butterfly sporting bright orange and black wings. Butterflies are not the only fans of this strategy. Aposematism can be found in other insects, such as ladybird beetles, but also among animals as different as poison dart frogs and opistobranchs (colourful marine slugs). Just like the monarch, many species acquire toxic compounds from their food. Other species produce these poisons themselves. And to advertise their toxicity to the world, colour is not the only medium! Many species advertise to predators that it is better to leave them alone through sounds or odours. Simply said, aposematism means telling predators, through a variety of signals, that an animal is well defended.

Danaus gilippus is a close relative of the monarch that can be found in tropical areas. Darién Province, Republic of Panamá (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Aposematism is not a novel discovery. This strategy was first suggested as a mechanism born from evolution by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1866. Even if aposematism is easy to understand, many questions still arise among scientists about this strategy. For example, how did it evolve? Could a butterfly like the monarch have developed it gradually, becoming more orange with each generation? Alternatively, did it evolve through rapid mutation? A lot of research will be needed to answer these questions. Other researchers try to tease apart the role of sexual selection in aposematism. Does a colourful animal have more descendants because predators avoid it, or because sexual partners prefer colourful mates?

Less well-known than the monarch, Eumaeus godartii (Lycaenidae) is another good example of aposematic butterfly. Chagres National Park, Republic of Panamá (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Another interesting aspect of aposematism is the phenomenal amount of mimetic strategies that arise from it. In Québec, one can meet the viceroy (Limenitis archippus) that, just as the monarch, covers itself in orange and black. But the viceroy is not poisonous! Thanks to this deception, the colours of the monarch allow the viceroy to be avoided by birds. This type of mimetic behaviour is called “Batesian mimicry”. This form of mimicry is also common in many harmless snakes that copy the colourful patterns of extremely venomous coral snakes.

A different situation is possible. What if many toxic species all look alike? If they do, all these species increase their chance of survival if a predator has learned to avoid the shared color pattern. All that is needed is for a predator to have had one bad experience with only one of the mimetic species for all to be protected. This type of mimicry is called “Müllerian mimicry”. Butterflies of the Heliconius genus, found in Central and South America are among the best studied cases. These toxic butterflies have very variable wing patterns, even within a single species. Surprisingly, two different species captured in the same locality look more similar than they do specimens of their respective species collected from far away locations. This regional similarity creates an effective protection for all mimics in the area.

Butterflies of the Heliconius genus and other closely related genera are an excellent example of Müllerian mimicry. Metropolitan Natural Park, Republic of Panamá (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

Many scientists are presently working on the mysteries still surrounding aposematism. Some use the latest genomic techniques, while others continue a long tradition of behavioural studies. After more than a century of research on this relatively simple strategy, there is still much to unravel and entomology remains a limitless field of study.

Jim Fyles and Ian Ritchie are already on the road, heading southwest, towing a trailer full of camping and cooking gear, the field library, and the miscellaneous equipment of field science. This is a post from the road by Jim Fyles.

5:47 am.

The trip has started.

The tires make a quiet crunching sound in the gravel at the end of the dark driveway. By the time we are ready to meet the class in Phoenix, those tires will have turned over 1.5 million rotations. We hope that they are up for it.

A perky voice with an English accent pipes up from the dashboard “Keep left on I271 Expressway Lane, continue 3.4 miles then turn right onto I271 South.” Our route finding is in good hands.

The sky In the rear-view mirror comes alive in pink and gold as we thread Cornwall in a sea of trucks. Geese and…

Remembering with emotion this Desert Ecology course. One of the best academic experiences of my life. Imagine, three weeks of camping in the desert with some of the best professors at McGill. The students of the 2015 edition will nourish this blog for the next three weeks.

Jim Fyles and Ian Ritchie are already on the road, heading southwest, towing a trailer full of camping and cooking gear, the field library, and the miscellaneous equipment of field science. This is a post from the road by Jim Fyles.

5:47 am.

The trip has started.

The tires make a quiet crunching sound in the gravel at the end of the dark driveway. By the time we are ready to meet the class in Phoenix, those tires will have turned over 1.5 million rotations. We hope that they are up for it.

A perky voice with an English accent pipes up from the dashboard “Keep left on I271 Expressway Lane, continue 3.4 miles then turn right onto I271 South.” Our route finding is in good hands.

The sky In the rear-view mirror comes alive in pink and gold as we thread Cornwall in a sea of trucks. Geese and…

When I tell friends that I conduct research at the Smithsonian, most think immediately of Washington. Fellow students and I are currently enrolled in a tropical biology field course at the Smithsonian… in Panamá, not on the Potomac shoreline! So let’s make things clear with a quick overview (i.e. publicity shpiel) of STRI, one of the world’s flagships of tropical research.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) is a community of researchers and scholars interested in the tropics. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution network and hosts 40 permanent scientists, 400 support staff and 1,400 visiting scientists and students. My colleagues and I, all graduate students of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Servicios de Alta Tecnología (INDICASAT) and McGill University’s NEO program, are part of this community.

Together, we seek to understand the tropics, in all their complexity, and merge our diverse areas of expertise to do so. According to STRI’s Scientist Emeritus, Egbert Leigh Jr., most of STRI’s research can be grouped under 12 broad areas. First, we seek to contrast and compare two oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, and understand how they came to be so different. We try to accumulate as much data as possible on the recent past, to understand what is happening today in both the human and natural worlds. We seek to understand the distant past through archaeology, and learn how our world came to be. We try to uncover why and how individuals diverge within a species to give rise to more species. We try to unravel the mysteries of mutualism, or why some species collaborate with each other while others prefer to cheat. We study social behaviour in animals, but also in humans within the Central American context. We want to understand what natural selection favors and why some traits make it to the next generation while others do not. We study the factors regulating populations of living organisms and the inner workings of food webs. We look at how species (humans included) cope with extremes (light, shade, drought, floods, lousy soils, etc.). We try to understand how so many species can coexist in a single place (900 species of birds in Panamá and around 300 tree species in 50 hectares of forest). We are definitely interested by a lingering question… why so many tropical trees (and why is their identification such a hellish job)? Finally, we want to get a global picture of tropical systems by unravelling the interdependencies that make ecosystems go-round.

Enough about questions, we need answers! Good research is backed by good infrastructure. Luckily for us, you can’t really beat STRI. We have access to 13 research facilities across the Isthmus of Panamá and here’s a very brief description of each.

This set of buildings hosts most of the administrative units, a score of laboratories equipped for all kinds of research, a herbarium, an insect collection and a library comprising over 69,000 volumes centered on tropical sciences. The old and rare books section is to die for… if you like getting your hands on the drawings of 17th to 19th century explorers.

If you dig fossils, that’s the place you want to be. Specialized in geology, geography and archaeology, scientists working here try to unravel the distant past, from giant (and thankfully extinct) snake species to the processes that explain why North and South America became one land mass three million years ago. Scientists from CTPA are currently using the Canal expansion project as a way to dig further into Panama’s past.

3) NAOS Island Laboratories

Located at the Pacific entrance of the Canal, this research facility has a state of the art molecular and genetics laboratory. It also has all you need to keep oceanic critters alive for research. People here specialise in Pacific oceanography and paleontology.

4) Galeta Point Marine Laboratory

NAOS’s counterpart, this research facility is located at the Caribbean entrance of the Canal. It is best known for research on the effects of oil spills and on mangrove systems.

A view of one of the numerous coral reefs neighboring the Bocas Del Toro Research Station (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

5) Bocas Del Toro Research Station

Located in the Bocas Del Toro Archipelago, this station hosts scientists who work on coral reefs, lagoon systems and lowland tropical forests. As it is located on the Caribbean side, in the middle of a cultural melting pot between Asia, Africa and the Americas, it is also a research hub on human sociality.

6) Rancheria Island

Located on a Pacific Island, this research station is in the middle of the Eastern Pacific Ocean’s largest concentration of coral reefs. It is the Pacific counterpart of Bocas Del Toro.

7) Punta Culebra Nature Center

Located on a Pacific Island, this center focuses on public awareness and outreach. Scientists try to test education strategies in order to better transmit knowledge to the coming generations.

Fortuna Forest Reserve is 1,200 meters (4,000 feet) up in the mountains and lets scientists study a particularly interesting tropical ecosystem… a cloud forest. I can tell you that the sun is rare out there, and it’s constantly wet. Some areas of the reserve receive 12 meters of rain a year (and have less than 30 rain-free days yearly).

A clear night sky in Fortuna is a rare event, less than 30 days a year are rainless (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

9) Agua Salud

This project, located within the Panamá Canal watershed covers 300,000 hectares. Scientists involved in this long-term study try to test the best reforestation strategies and how different techniques can be used to store carbon, control devastating floods, or improve soil fertility… all without banning agriculture. People here try to get to an optimal land-use strategy for the tropics.

10) Forest Canopy Access Systems

People at STRI are all smart. But some have exceptionally smart ideas. Two construction cranes were permanently installed in the rainforest on both the Pacific and Caribbean sides so that scientists could easily access the forest canopy. Wonder how we could get this close to a mommy sloth and its baby in the posts from Scott, Librada and Flor? Yup, we were in a crane.

11) Gamboa Campus

Here we are! this is the main base our group used for the Tropical Biology Field Course 2015. Gamboa Campus is located at the dead center of the Panamá Canal, and has a suite of laboratories. Also, a lot of specialized research happens here. There is a system of “pods” to grow plants in different temperature and atmospheric conditions to unravel the effects climate change might have in the tropics. There are flight cages that bats call home and where their behaviour is finely analyzed. And there is Pipeline road, a well-known spot for anyone interested in birds (See Elise’s post on the IGERT-NEO blog).

Among all our activities in Gamboa, bat trapping was certainly one of the most interesting (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

12) Barro Colorado Nature Monument (BCI)

The Crown Jewel! Barro Colorado is an island, surrounded by three peninsulas, all protected by the Panamanian government and the Smithsonian Institution. Only research can go on here. With its 5,400 hectares, it is the oldest STRI facility, first occupied in 1924. The island itself is a no-touch zone. You can measure and observe, but you can’t change anything. The peninsulas are used for experiments, as in… what happens if you kill all lianas in a forest? Do the trees grow better? Or again, what happens if you change the nutrient regimes by dumping tons of fertilisers?

A view of the main buildings on BCI island (Photo: Nicolas Chatel-Launay).

13) Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS)

Located on BCI Island and founded in 1980, this 50 hectares forest plot gave us the most precious data set ever collected in tropical biology. Every single tree stem larger than 1 cm (there are roughly 200,000 of them), is identified to species, measured, and recensused every five years. The same goes for lianas, and many groups of shrubs. We also have precise soil composition data all over the plot. We have mammal, bird and insect inventories for the area. Many mammals and birds even have radio collars; we can track their every movement in the forest. Basically, we can have lots of fun with lots of data. Not only is the 50-hectare plot an awesome dataset, it had children. CTFS plots are now all over the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. People there collect data in the same manner, using the same protocol. This way, we can compare forests through space and through time, precisely, individual by individual, all over the world. Imagine what questions you can explore with that.

So here we are! This was a small overview of what we do, and where we do it. STRI is composed of biologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, and specialists of other fields trying to answer one question. What makes the tropics tick? And if you’re jealous, well don’t be. You are welcome to join in this adventure.